In coming thus to the last famed stream I shall visit in Europe, I might say, with Barry Cornwall:
"We've sailed through banks of green,
Where the wild waves fret and quiver;
And we've down the Danube been—
The dark, deep, thundering river!
We've thridded the Elbe and Rhone,
The Tiber and blood dyed Seine,
And we've been where the blue Garonne
Goes laughing to meet the main!"
All that night did we endure squeezing and suffocation, and no morn was ever more welcome than that which revealed to us Paris. With matted hair, wild, glaring eyes, and dusty and dishevelled habiliments, we entered the gay capital, and blessed every stone upon which we placed our feet, in the fulness of our joy.
In paying our fare at Auxerre, I was obliged to use a draft on the banker, Rougemont de Lowenberg. The ignorant conductor hesitated to change this, but permitted us to go, on condition of keeping it until we should arrive. Therefore, on getting out of the diligence, after forty-eight hours of sleepless and fasting misery, the facteur of the office went with me to get it paid, leaving B—— to wait for us. I knew nothing of Paris, and this merciless man kept me for three hours at his heels, following him on all his errands, before he did mine, in that time traversing the whole length of the city, in order to leave a chèvre-feuille at an aristocratic residence in the Faubourg St. Germain. Yet even combined weariness and hunger could not prevent me from looking with vivid interest down a long avenue, at the Column of the place Vendôme, in passing, and gazing up in wonder at the splendid portico of the Madeleine. But of anything else I have a very faint remembrance. "You can eat breakfast, now, I think," said he, when we returned, "we have walked more than four leagues!"
I know we will be excused, that, instead of hurrying away to Notre Dame or the Louvre, we sat down quietly to a most complete breakfast. Even the most romantic must be forced to confess that admiration does not sit well on an empty stomach. Our first walk was to a bath, and then, with complexions several shades lighter, and limbs that felt us if lifted by invisible wings, we hurried away to the Post Office. I seized the welcome missives from my far home, with a beating heart, and hastening back, read till the words became indistinct in the twilight.
CHAPTER XLV. — POETICAL SCENES IN PARIS.
What a gay little world in miniature this is! I wonder not that the French, with their exuberant gaiety of spirit, should revel in its ceaseless tides of pleasure, as if it were an earthly Elysium. I feel already the influence of its cheerful atmosphere, and have rarely threaded the crowds of a stranger city, with so light a heart as I do now daily, on the thronged banks of the Seine. And yet it would be difficult to describe wherein consists this agreeable peculiarity. You can find streets as dark and crooked and dirty anywhere in Germany, and squares and gardens as gay and sunny beyond the Alps, and yet they would affect you far differently. You could not, as here, divest yourself of every particle of sad or serious thought and be content to gaze for hours on the showy scene, without an idea beyond the present moment. It must be that the spirit of the croud is magnetically contagious.
The evening of our arrival we walked out past the massive and stately Hotel de Ville, and took a promenade along the Quais. The shops facing the river presented a scene of great splendor. Several of the Quais on the north bank of the Seine are occupied almost entirely by jewellers, the windows of whose shops, arranged in a style of the greatest taste, make a dazzling display. Rows of gold watches and chains are arranged across the crystal panes, and heaped in pyramids on long glass slabs; cylindrical wheels of wire, hung with jewelled breastpins and earrings, turn slowly around by some invisible agency, displaying row after row of their glittering treasures.